Humanity's Hope: Helion

We might be at an extraordinary inflection point.

Climate change is out of control and accelerating.

Post-industrial demographics are out of control and accelerating.

Politics are out of control and accelerating.

It all looks really terrible, but there is one extraordinary thing that looks like it’s going to work, and if it does it’s a global, historical game change.

Helion Energy has what looks to be a workable method for harnessing aneutronic fusion. Let’s have a look at this wonder.

Attention Conservation Notice:

I had the usual twenty credits of chemistry and physics, including a state of quantum physics survey class. I have no great expertise, but I am very well read. That being said, there might be sub-atomic physics and stoichometry and stuff in here. Maybe you should just start running now …

Fusion Processes:

The earliest stars started out with nothing but primordial hydrogen, while newer starts pick up supernova debris, so they can have “metals”, basically anything other than hydrogen, in their atmospheres. Stars like our sun are still fusing hydrogen in a proton+proton reaction, while stars a bit larger use the carbon cycle, commonly abbreviated to CNO cycle. Cycling through carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, emitting a carbon and helium nucleus at the end, this cycle is catalytic in nature.. There is also a triple alpha particle (helium nucleus) path.

Humans have been pissing away money on a fusion reactor design called the Tokamak since just after World War II. They’re trying to recreate the proton-proton reaction, but the Tokamak can’t keep the plasma confined and hot long enough to do anything,, This method also produces a LOT of loose neutrons, which tear up metal and make things in the general vicinity radioactive.

The more promising method is aneutronic fusion. As the name suggests, these methods produce relatively few neutrons. The candidate fuels are hydrogen, helium, lithium, and boron. There was a designed some years ago that focused on boron and it looked very promising, but it came to naught.

Helion Fusion:

The Helion reactors use deuterium, the type of hydrogen found in heavy water, and they produce helium 3 as a byproduct. The relationship between deuterium and helium-3 is similar to uranium/plutonium - both are workable fuels, but in Helion’s case it even better, because their reactor can use helium-3 directly, no need to extract/process it.

Deuterium is a hydrogen atom with an optional neutron in its nucleus, and roughly one in every five thousand hydrogen atoms has this. If you want large amounts of deuterium you electrolyze water to produce diatomic hydrogen gas, then you cool the result gas to just short of the temperature where hydrogen becomes liquid. The deuterium condenses out first, a couple of degrees before the lighter hydrogen. You’re left with a stream of H2 molecules that have one deuterium, and a flow of very cold plain ol’ hydrogen that could be liquified for other uses, or piped a short distance to use in chemical processes.

Helion’s fusion is brilliant for an additional reason - it can direct drive electrical generation. There’s no need to boil water to drive a turbine, and then waste enormous amounts of water cooling things after generation. These reactors do have some cooling requirements, but it’s minuscule compared to the flawed Tokamak designs.

Real World Scenario:

A Helion reactor could be used to drive an electrolyzer process, which produces hydrogen for a cryogenic separation, and a lot of low quality heat in the form of volumes of cooling water at around 77C. That’s waste heat … unless it’s used to drive a distillation process to produce fresh water.

If you’re already building a cryogenic cooling facility, you could use it to freeze carbon dioxide from the incoming air at -80C, with liquid oxygen dropping out at -183C and nitrogen at -196C. There will be a small amount of argon coming out at -189C, which has economic value on its own. If you push through to around -250C you’ll get neon, which also has economic value.

The Haber Bosch process can be used to combine three hydrogen from that aforementioned 4999/5000ths plain ol’ hydrogen and one nitrogen to produce ammonia. This is a caustic cryogenic liquid, but it’s much easier to transport and store than hydrogen. If you want to pipe hydrogen it’s the devil to handle - it will diffuse through polymers and dissociate and tunnel through metals. You need a plastic/metal laminate in a water jacket and then you monitor it for leaks.

There aren’t any long distance hydrogen pipelines, the longest measure hundreds of meters. The U.S. has about 3,000 miles of ammonia pipelines that connect production facilities in the Gulf Coast region to farm country. We make about 140 million tons of ammonia globally each year and 90% of it is used for fertilizer.

Oxygen is basically a waste product, the market for it is not strong, so it can be restored to air temperature by using it to cool the 77C water from the electrolyzers, or the ammonia reactor, which runs very hot. If you’ve got something you’re going to burn anyway, like trash in an incinerator, using a pure oxygen environment makes things burn that otherwise would not.

Carbon dioxide captured early on can be used to make several different carbon/hydrogen compounds - natural gas, natural gas liquids, and methanol. The Fischer Tropsch process is the most common method discussed. Sequestering carbon is the long term goal, but simply getting a second round of economic activity from it before re-emitting is a good thing to have available as we start to turn our economy from endless carbon exhumation.

At the end of these various processes you would have some of ammonia, argon, carbon dioxide, distilled water, cryogenic hydrogen, methanol, neon, NGLs, cryogenic nitrogen and oxygen - basically a LOT of the building blocks for various things our society consumes in great volumes. And except for the water this stuff is all just floating around in our atmosphere, free for the taking, if your electricity is plentiful and contributes no emissions of its own.

Mobility:

Helion reactors can be built in a wide range of sizes. A question which I want answered is how much power can come out of a system that fits into a 2TU standard 40’ shipping container. If they can break thirty megawatts in a setup that size they could replace the numerous General Electric LM2500 gas turbines that drive so many ships. Right now U.S. aircraft carriers, Russian ice breakers, and high end attack/ballistic missile submarines are the only nuclear powered vessels we build.

If the fuel is functionally free, every ship above a certain size would be powered this way, and fifty knot plus rapid freight catamarans from Austal would start eating into air transport for some goods. If you can get that thirty megawatts out of a 2TU form factor, and it’s under fifty tons, it matches the horsepower needed for an Airbus A400 and it weighs less than the full fuel load. Jets will vanish from the freight market and passenger planes will be slower, but larger, and more comfortable.

The Liberty Lifter, a hybrid ekranoplan/standard flying boat, it highly efficient skimming just above the water, but it can climb like a normal plane if conditions are too rough. You’ll likely never ride on one, as their service ceiling is nowhere near the altitude of commercial airliners, which seek to get above turbulence. This is a pure freight/military endeavor.

If you’ve got a bunch of argon, that’s a suitable reaction mass for an ion engine. If you’ve got something that size of an LM2500 that kicks out thirty megawatts, you could built space ships that don’t accelerate all that quickly, but which can run flat out for years at a time, pushing ships to very high velocities.

If you’re familiar with current ion engine practices, you might be wondering why I don’t suggest xenon here. The densest of noble gases, xenon is 2,000 times the cost of argon. It makes sense for tiny ships powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, that thinking won’t hold up when interplanetary ships weigh hundreds of tons.

Climate Change:

If you’ve got a Helion power plant and you’re making your own deuterium, that’s a starting point.

You can electrify everything - home heating and transportation being the obvious first targets for emissions reduction.

Any carbon dioxide captured could be sequestered, but that will probably not be the case, at least at first. It’s too valuable for use as a feedstock to make other chemicals we still need. The big advantage in this area will come from cutting coal and natural gas emissions from electrical generation long before we try carbon capture.

Here’s a very long ball - if you’ve got a Helion generator at the south pole of the moon, you could power drone mining vehicles to scoop up regolith, pulverize it to dust, and use a mass driver to shoot containers of it into Earth orbit. If the containers are made of a polymer that photodegrades, you’d end up with puffs of dust in orbit. We could create an artificial ring that would reduce solar inputs for our planet, heading off that angle of climate change.

That is NOT a means to dodge ending carbon exhumation, because in addition to ocean acidification, CO2 is going to take 50% of our cognitive capabilities by the year 2100.

Conclusion:

I became aware of how dangerous climate change was in 2007, and then I started researching renewable ammonia production. If we could make it using intermittent wind energy, that’s perfect for the U.S. - lots of wind on the plains, and that’s where we use most of our nitrogen fertilizer, every type of which starts with ammonia.

I first noticed Helion a couple months ago and the fact that they have a contract with Microsoft to start producing power in 2028 was low key amazing. If it really is a commercially viable generation method, it’s as much of a game change as when we learned to dig coal, or drill for oil, or pump natural gas.

The Ottoman Empire did not survive the devaluation of their silver currency by Imperial Spain’s new world gold. British industrialization was driven by coal and while they did use oil, they were eclipsed by the United States. None of the potential competitors to the U.S. for global dominance will do so based on natural gas. To the contrary, oil dependent powers are seeking to turn the clock back, rather than move our species forward.

The entity best positioned to do that cultural and technically is Europe, followed quite closely by the Asian manufacturing powers. They don’t have any oil wealth incumbents with their greasy mitts all over the political levers of power.

We will always have some liquid fuel in use - you can’t electrify farm country, combines and tractors are always going to run on diesel. But the vast majority of us could do things differently. The question is whether we’re politically capable of following the path of rationality and reason, or if we’re unable to escape the clutches of radicalized religious fanatics.

I guess we don’t have much longer to wait to find out which it will be …